Architexturez South Asia
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Exploring the socio-spatial patterns of diversity and its influencing factors at a metropolitan scale
No full textResponding to a critical gap in diversity studies which have been mostly dedicated to Western contexts, and setting the scene for celebrating an ignored issue in the Iranian context are the aims of this study. To these ends, Tehran is selected, and its socio-spatial patterns of diversity are studied through a GIS-based analysis. Results suggest that housing and residential diversity are highly correlated. Influencing factors of diversity also indicate that diverse neighborhoods are usually smaller ones with higher population density. Surprisingly, land-use diversity does not have any significant relationship with housing and residential diversity in Tehran neighborhoods. Residential diversity usually occurs in neighborhoods, where jobs opportunities are more available, open spaces are more frequent, and individuals feel more secure. Recovering balances between residential and housing predictory variables and planning in the scale of neighborhoods rather than urban regions are what planners should seek through the notion of planning for diversity.</p
Securing Urban Frontiers: A View from Yangon, Myanmar
No full textThis article examines how variegated local and transnational interactions are reconfiguring Myanmar's largest city of Yangon. We do this through an analytical focus on frontiers and an empirical focus on how these are secured, drawing on interviews at two Security Expos and street‐level observations in Yangon conducted over three years. Yangon thereby becomes a site for critical reflections about complex and multiple imbrications of frontiers, security and the urban with implications for how these may be conceptualized elsewhere.</p
Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies: Distinction through the Aga Khan Award for Architecture
No full textThis book discusses architectural excellence in Islamic societies drawing on textual and visual materials, from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, developed over more than three decades. At the core of the discussion are the efforts, processes, and outcomes of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA).
The AKAA recognises excellence in architectural and urban interventions within cities and settlements in the Islamic world which are continuously challenged by dramatic changes in economies, societies, political systems, decision-making, and environmental requirements. Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societiesresponds to the recurring question about the need for architectural awards, arguing that they are critical to validating the achievements of professional architects while making their contributions more widely acknowledged by the public. Through analysis and critique of over sixty awarded and shortlisted projects from over thirty-five countries, this book provides an expansive look at the history of the AKAA through a series of narratives on the enduring values of architecture, architectural and urban conservation, built environment sustainability, and architectural pluralism and multiple modernities.
Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies will appeal to professionals and academics, researchers, and upper-level students in architectural history and theory and built environment related fields.</p
Blue Infrastructures: Natural History, Political Ecology and Urban Development in Kolkata
No full textThis book focuses on Kolkata, formerly the colonial capital of and currently a major megacity in India, in terms of its extensive blue infrastructures, i.e., its rivers, canals and wetlands as an integrated composite whole. It unfolds ways in which this reclaimed urban space could determine, and in turn, could get determined by political fate, economic calculations and social livelihoods across changing political-economic imperatives and with large-scale implications on urban sustainability. Employing historical urban political ecology (HUPE) as the methodological framework by combining urban environmental history and urban political ecology, the book studies the changing urban environmental equations through several centuries, and its impact on the city and its people. Weaving the past, present and posterity of deltaic Kolkata, the book demonstrates that it is in these ‘blue infrastructures’ that the anecdote of origin, the account of functioning and the apprehension of survival of the city is rooted. By emphasizing the ecology ‘of’ cities instead of ecology ‘in’ cities approach, the book exposes the limitations of contemporary ecological restructuring efforts regarding Indian cities. Further, it offers a blueprint for future innovative and empirical research focusing on other major cities. Accordingly, this topical and original book will be of interest to students and researchers of environmental humanities, political ecology and urban studies.</p
Traditional craftspeople are not copycats: Potter idiosyncrasies in vessel morphogenesis
No full textCeramics are quintessential indicators of human culture and its evolution across generations of social learners. Cultural transmission and evolution theory frequently emphasizes apprentices’ need for accurate imitation (high-fidelity copying) of their mentors’ actions. However, the ensuing prediction of standardized fashioning patterns within communities of practice has not been directly addressed in handicraft traditions such as pottery throwing. To fill this gap, we analysed variation in vessel morphogenesis amongst and within traditional potters from culturally different workshops producing for the same market. We demonstrate that, for each vessel type studied, individual potters reliably followed distinctive routes through morphological space towards a much-less-variable common final shape. Our results indicate that mastering the pottery handicraft does not result from accurately reproducing a particular model behaviour specific to the community’s cultural tradition. We provide evidence that, at the level of the elementary clay-deforming gestures, individual learning rather than simple imitation is required for the acquisition of a complex motor skill such as throwing pottery.</p
“S.I.T.E” (Societal-Institutional-Technical-Economic) Valuation Framework: A Case of Drinking-Water Facilities and Services in Slum Areas of the Hyderabad Region, India
No full textThis paper provides the original research contribution, titled “S.I.T.E valuation of Infrastructure facilities and Services” (Societal-Institutional-Technical-Economic valuation—A systematic and integrated valuation framework for decision-making processes to provide safe and adequate infrastructure facilities and services to urban poor, in a cost-effective manner). In India, there are various policies, programmes, schemes, and projects to improve the infrastructure conditions and many are still ongoing to meet the Millennium Development goals. Nevertheless, the infrastructure associated challenges still persevere, particularly in slum areas, leading to adversative consequences in terms of deprived health, loss of productivity—making the living of the poor population even more miserable. Despite having urban planning instruments that are steering the policies and projects, specifically designed for improving the infrastructure for slum population, the decision-making processes for developing policies and projects were amalgamation of many apprehensions, leading the government agencies unable to meet their set objectives and targets of sustainability, equity, effectiveness, efficiency and good governance in the decisions made, and in providing the requisite infrastructure facilities and services. As a portion of the case study analysis, this paper examines in detail the decision-making processes involved in providing the drinking-water facilities and services to slum areas in the Hyderabad region. It is revealing that the current decision-making support is only accounting for the technical and financial parameters—making it more a techno-bureaucratic approach, but not considering social, institutional, and economic aspects. In order to address these concerns, it is vital for the urban administrators to consider and analyze social, institutional, technical, and economic aspects pertaining to infrastructure facilities and services in an integrated fashion for their search of solutions during decision-making processes. This research paper provides insights on the proposed theoretical framework “S.I.T.E” valuation, a systematic and integrated valuation framework for the decision-making process to provide safe and adequate infrastructure facilities and services to urban poor population in metropolitan cities in order to meet the set objectives and targets.</p
Making Sense of Temples and Tirthas: Rajput Construction Under Mughal Rule
No full textThis article examines temple construction under Mughal rule by significant Rajput rulers—some reluctant and some amenable—to accepting Mughal authority. During the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries high ranking Hindu nobles who easily found favour with the Mughal court built on both their ancestral lands and on crown lands, but those who accepted Mughal hegemony under duress had a more complicated attitude towards temple construction. The temples that the latter group provided were largely in their own territories, often at pilgrimage sites or at sites they intended to transform into pilgrimage sites. The main questions which is article addresses are: Where did these rulers build temples, why and what forms did they take? How does temple construction provide insights into cultural and political aspirations of Rajput kingdoms? Finally, what were the problems arising out of neglect associated of their maintenance and upkeep?</p
Efficiency in waste collection markets: Changing relationships between firms, informal workers, and the state in urban India
No full textAlthough recent scholarship has provided rich accounts of waste management privatization in urban India, the origins of the policy models that informed privatization remain unexplored. Further, the place of informal workers in the history of waste management policy and programs is more complicated than that provided by linear accounts of a transition from informal to formal in the existing scholarship. In contrast to existing explanations of these shifts, this paper draws attention to the rise of efficiency as a core municipal concern that explains the shifting relationship arrangements between the state, the informal private sector, and the formal private sector in waste collection markets. To address their concerns with cost of service delivery, Indian policy-makers justified privatization by indirectly drawing upon the influential work of E.S. Savas, the American economist credited with empirically substantiating the theory of efficiency gains from privatization in waste collection markets. Yet, informal systems are in practice not only more efficient than formal ones, they also conform well to Savas’ policy prescriptions for structuring waste collection markets. Efficiency could thus serve as a basis for securing informal workers’ claims as legitimate market participants.</p
Workplace, emotional bonds and agency: Everyday gendered experiences of work in an export processing zone in Tamil Nadu, India
No full textThis article advances labour geography’s understanding of worker agency by examining how women actively remake the workplace by forming emotional bonds and community on and off the shop floor. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research with women workers in a Nokia cell-phone factory, I prioritise attention to the ways that women act, live, work and struggle in their attempt to ‘rework’ or resist their work-life situations in a patriarchal capitalist system. I show that in the everyday practices and experiences of work and work life, women form complex feelings towards their workplaces, including a sense of self-worth and feelings of belonging and mutual care. Work is more than just a job. The research urges greater recognition of the ways in which: (a) agency is produced in the workplace through the everyday social practice of care and emotional bonds that women form with each other and, through that, to their work; (b) that agency acts both as a form of resistance and as a form of attachment to the workplace; and (c) for women, work is not just about wages – nor is it just about social reproduction through the family – it is also about the social reproduction of new identities and forms of community that are forged at work, which both shape and are shaped by their experiences as workers.</p
